Qiang Xu

Chengdu University of Technology | CDUT · State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection

At 14:28 (Beijing time) on 12 May 2008, the catastrophic Ms 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake occurred just west of the Sichuan basin, China, causing severe damage and numerous casualties. It also triggered a large number of landslides, rock avalanches, debris flows etc. Some of the landslides formed natural dams in the rivers, with the potential secondary h...

On June 5, 2009, a catastrophic rockslide-debris flow occurred at the crest of the Jiweishan Mountain in Wulong, Chongqing, China. Approximately five million cubic meters of limestone blocks slid along a weak interlayer of bituminous and carbonaceous shale. The source mass descended from the upper part of the slope rapidly, crossing a 200-m wide an...

The 5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008 induced hundreds of large-scale landslides. This paper systematically analyzes 112 large-scale landslides (surface area > 50000 m2), which were identified by interpretation of remote sensing imagery and field investigations. The analysis suggests that the distribution of large-scale landslides is affected by the...

The 2008.5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake (seismic magnitude Mw 7.9 according to the USGS) triggered a great number of landslides. A spatial database of landslides is built by interpreting the remote sensing (RS) data which covers 11 counties severely damaged by the earthquake with area of about 31,686.12 km². The geological settings of the study area are...

The Ms 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 dramatically changed the terrain surface and caused long-term increases in the scale and frequency of landslides and debris flows. The changing trend of landslides in the earthquake-affected area over the decade since the earthquake remains largely unknown. In this study, we were able to address this issue usi...

China has a significant portion of land in landslide-prone areas, and remote sensing technologies are becoming a tool of choice to investigate and monitor landslides. Although much progress has been made with remote sensing technologies and their applications in China, there is no systematical summary report. Thus, we summarize Synthetic Aperture R...

On September 5, 2022, an Ms6.8 earthquake struck Luding County, Sichuan Province, China. Through creating a coseismic landslide prediction model, we obtained the spatial distribution of the triggered geological hazards immediately after the earthquake. Through collecting all available multi-source optical remote sensing images of the earthquake-aff...

The current highest glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) risk level is centered in the eastern Himalaya. GLOFs represent a serious threat to downstream inhabitants and ecological environment. In the context of climate warming on the Tibetan Plateau, such GLOFs will continue or even intensify in the future. Remote sensing and statistical methods are...

Long-term nighttime light data can effectively reflect the spatiotemporal evolution pattern of urban areas. Based on nighttime light data obtained from 1992 to 2021, the spatiotemporal expansion modes of urban areas on the Loess Plateau were investigated by remote sensing image band fusion processing, geospatial analysis, statistics and classificat...

Since 2012, a mega-project, “Mountain Excavation and City Construction” (MECC), has been underway on the Chinese Loess Plateau, aiming to create extra flat ground for urban growth. However, this large-scale land creation has led to dramatic changes in the local geological environment, forming a large number of engineered loess slopes. This study ai...

An Ms 6.8 earthquake struck Luding County, Ganzi Prefecture, Sichuan Province on 5 September 2022, with the epicenter about 10 km away from Hailuogou Glacier. How Hailuogou Glacier was affected by the earthquake was of major concern to society. Sentinel-1 SAR satellite imaging was used to monitor the glacier surface velocity during different period...

Loess landslides pose significant physical and environmental threats to communities of the Heifangtai Terrace in Gansu Province, China. Estimating potentially affected areas using dynamic numerical simulations provides a foundation for risk assessment and management. However, current studies often use rheological input parameters derived from the b...

Plain Language Summary The doublet earthquake frequently occurred in the southeast part of the Zagros fold‐and‐thrust belt in the past years. In this study, we first adopted the Synthetic Aperture Radar images captured by Sentinel‐1 satellite to map the coseismic surface deformation of the 2022 Hormozgan doublet earthquake. The uplift of fault‐rela...

Loess landslides are widely distributed in Northern China and pose a significant threat to human life, natural resources, and infrastructure in mountainous regions. Accurate segmentation and measurement of loess landslides is crucial to documenting their occurrence and extent and investigating the distribution, types, and patterns of slope failures...

On April 6, 2021, the Baihetan dam launched impoundment, and the reservoir water surface elevation dramatically increased from 660 m to 812 m until October 2021, which may induce large-scale landslides in reservoir bank. Accurate landslides susceptibility evaluation during impoundment is crucial for controlling the possible disasters and taking ear...

Slope bearing capacity is one of the most important characteristics in slope engineering and is strongly influenced by weak planes, loading conditions, and slope geometry. By presenting the evolution of slip surfaces, this paper explored how the slope bearing capacity is affected by widely observed influencing factors. The initiation and propagatio...

From 2011 to 2013, a mega project, known as the Gully Land Consolidation Project (GLCP), was implemented in the hilly gully region atop China’s Loess Plateau. However, the GLCP involved large-scale slope excavation and gully backfilling that changed the local geological environment, which led to serious geohazards, such as erosion, soil salinizatio...

As the Third Pole of the Earth and the Water Tower of Asia, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) nurtures large numbers of glacial lakes, which are sensitive to global climate change. These lakes modulate the freshwater ecosystem in the region but concurrently pose severe threats to the valley population by means of sudden glacial lake outbursts and consequent...

Landslides are major geological hazards and frequently occur in mountainous areas with steep slopes, often causing significant loss. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has been widely used in landslide measurement over the last three decades. However, InSAR only can measure one-dimensional displacements (i.e. those in the radar’s line...

The Niexia slope, located in Danba County, Sichuan Province, China, with steep slope terrain and dense vegetation coverage, has a height difference of about 3002 m. A traditional manual survey cannot be performed here, and single remote sensing technology is not comprehensive enough to identify potential landslides on such high and steep slopes. In...

Rainfall‐induced flowslides and the subsequent debris flows are the most recurrent and destructive natural hazards due to their high velocity and long‐distance runout. It is widely accepted that shear‐induced excess pore pressure controls the high fluidity in flowslide movement. Nevertheless, flume experiments demonstrate that flowslides can exhibi...

Landslides are prone to occur frequently with many aspects, wide coverage, and serious threats. Therefore, based on "satellite-aerial-surface-deep"collaborative integrated big data observations, it is of great significance to carry out early landslide identification, susceptibility assessment, and prediction to ensure the safety of people's lives a...

Rill erosion on unpaved roads is widespread and highly destructive on the Loess Plateau of China, but the exploration of its evolution mechanism is scarce. In this study, a multiphase runoff scour experiment was performed on an abandoned field road in the Loess Plateau, China. Using a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS), scour experiments are used to e...

Multi-source datasets, including the UAV-Lidar/Photogrammetry, InSAR, and field investigation data, have been used for revealing the complex surface displacement pattern and focal mechanism of the 2021 Maduo Mw 7.3 earthquake. First, a co-seismic surface deformation field was extracted from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images captured by ALOS...

Plain Language Summary Strong earthquakes with larger magnitudes and longer durations trigger many landslides. Some mechanisms have been proposed to explain the triggering, for example, seismic waves provide additional driving force which increases the shear stress on the sliding plane. Earthquakes may cause an increase of pore pressure, which redu...

The configuration of slip surface is conventionally regarded as a key characteristic to distinguish slope failure modes that are embedded in the limited equilibrium method and the bearing capacity theories. However, few studies indicated that a different way of propagating a slip surface with the same configuration might affect the mechanical behav...

Slope site seismic response is different from one of the flat sites, it has been known for many years; and this phenomenon has also attracted great attention in China since the “5.12” Wenchuan earthquake. From 2008, the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard prevention and Geoenvironment protection (SKLGP) has started to complete long term and systemati...

The devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (Mw 7.9) was the largest seismic event in China in the past more than 50 years and is characterized by extremely high level of induced acceleration. For example, the strong ground motion recorded at the Wolong seismic station registered the EW, NS, and UD peak accelerations being 957.7, 652.9, and 948.1 Gal,...

Strong earthquakes shake mountains and trigger thousands of landslides, from small and shallow soil failures to large, fast, and deadly rock avalanches. Although a large body of literature in the past discussed the dynamics and surface processes of earthquake-induced landslides, less attention has been received on the post-earthquake surface geomor...

In 1881, the Swiss village of Elm was devastated by a rock avalanche that had originated two kilometers away. Geologist Albert Heim reported on the impressive event, prompting over a century of research on the extraordinary long runout of giant landslides. However, after one century of research, the answer to the question of why a dry mass can beha...

The hydraulic properties of compacted loess are important to engineering construction in loess regions. In this study, filling loess collected from the filled valley regions of Yan’an New District, China, is taken as the research object to explore the influence of compaction conditions on the saturated permeability based on permeability test and nu...

Recycled rubber particles can be produced by using waste tires. Adding recycled rubber particles to concrete can form rubber concrete (RC). RC can not only reduce the amount of natural sand and reduce the cost of concrete but also improve the static compressive toughness of concrete. Adding steel fiber into RC can improve the strength of concrete....

As the Third Pole of the Earth and the Water Tower of Asia, Tibetan Plateau (TP) nurtures large numbers of glacial lakes, which are sensitive to global climate change. These lakes modulate the freshwater ecosystem in the region, but concurrently pose severe threats to the valley population by means of sudden glacial lake outbursts and consequent fl...

Due to their practicability, simple and data-driven empirical models have been extensively developed and applied in practical engineering to predict the run-out distance of landslides. However, the definition of the most appropriate empirical model for specific landslide data is rarely discussed. Moreover, the empirical model is subjected to the hi...

Large ice/rock avalanches have been known to generate extremely powerful air blasts capable of causing fatalities and destruction far beyond the runout of the movement mass. Thus, an appraisal of their possible destructive air blast should be considered during the risk assessments. However, much less is known about how avalanche-induced air blasts...

Gaofen-3 is the first Chinese spaceborne C-band SAR satellite with multiple polarizations. The Gaofen-3 satellite’s data has few applications for monitoring landslides at present, and its potential for use requires further investigation. Consequently, we must evaluate and analyze the landslide interference quality and displacement monitoring derive...

Earthquake-induced geohazards, in particular landslides and debris flows, have the ability to disturb large stocks of organic carbon. Even a slight change in these stocks of organic carbon could affect atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Yet, the fate of ecosystem carbon delivery caused by a mega-earthquake over a short timescale is not well understood...

The forecast of failure time of unstable slope and the definition of early warning threshold are very important for preventing landslide disaster and reducing its losses. Based on the monitoring curve of unstable slope deformation varying with time, the mathematical models are used to accurately describe the nonlinear creep behavior in the initial...

Landslides are a major geohazard that endangers human lives and properties. Recently, efforts have been made to use Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) for landslide monitoring. However, it is still difficult to effectively and automatically identify slow-moving landslides distributed over a large area due to phase unwrapping errors, de...

Aeolian sand is characterized by low shear strength and poor self-stabilization, making the construction of tunnels in this stratum highly susceptible to collapse and instability, as well as causing surface subsidence and sand leakage, causing significant impacts on the local geology and environment. Tunnel linings that can provide adequate support...

Early detection of rockslides at high-elevation and well-vegetated slopes remains challenging. This study used satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) optical remote-sensing (ORS) images to track evidence of slope deformation and examine potential geomorphological precursors of five large rockslides in China. The multi-temporal image interpreta...

With the development of deep learning algorithms, more and more deep learning algorithms are being applied to remote sensing image classification, detection, and semantic segmentation. The landslide semantic segmentation of a remote sensing image based on deep learning mainly uses supervised learning, the accuracy of which depends on a large number...

Recycled steel fiber (RSF)-reinforced concrete is not only an innovative research trend in the field of civil engineering materials, but also a new type of civil engineering composites under the trend of low-carbon development. This article deals with the experimental study of applying waste steel fibers to form recycled steel fiber concrete (RSFC)...

The influence of fines content (FC) on flow instability of intact and reconstituted Chinese loess is studied under undrained monotonic loading using conventional triaxial tests. The undrained behaviour of a mixed loess system indicates that the increasing plastic fines reduce the peak strength with little effect on the critical state friction angle...

The geomorphic evolution of loess tablelands (LTs), loess ridges (LRs) and loess hills (LHs) affects the availability of local farmland. The present study distinguished the evolutionary stages of different loess geomorphic units using mathematical morphology and analyzed the evolutionary process from LT to LR to LH from geomorphic characteristics a...

For Yan’an (China) and many other cities on the Loess Plateau, development is limited by a severe lack of available land. To support the city’s sustainable development, the Yan’an New District (YND) was constructed in 2012 through a mountain excavation and city construction (MECC) project. However, rapid land creation and urbanization have caused e...

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and unmanned aerial vehicle-structure from motion (UAV-SfM) provide point clouds with unprecedented resolution and accuracy that are well suited for the digital characterization of rock outcrops where direct contact measurements cannot be obtained due to terrain or safety constraints. Today, however, how...

Abstract—Change detection (CD) with hyperspectral images (HSIs) can be effectively performed using deep learning networks (DLN) thanking the advantages of HSIs for their rich spectral and spatial information composed and the excellent performance of DLN in machine learning. By modeling the temporal dependence of multi-scale representative features,...

Catastrophic debris flows frequently occur in mountainous areas after an earthquake owing to a substantially increased amount of loosened co-seismic material. Debris flows pose a serious challenge for the reconstruction of earthquake-stricken areas because of their potential reoccurrence over the course of several years after a given earthquake eve...

Co-seismic landslide mapping after earthquake event is essential for emergency rescue, geohazard prevention, and post-disaster reconstruction. Most co-seismic landslide mapping is primarily achieved via field surveys or visual interpretation of remote sensing images. However, such methods are highly labor-intensive and time-consuming, particularly...

Since 2008, the water level of the Three Gorges Reservoir has been periodically fluctuating between 175 and 145 m. The rise and fall of the reservoir water level result in changes in the seepage field in the slopes on both banks of the reservoir. Groundwater is an important factor affecting the stability and reactivation of landslides. Developing a...

On 8th August 2017, a catastrophic Ms. 7.0 earthquake with a focal depth of 20 km struck the Jiuzhaigou County in Sichuan Province, China. It exerted a strong influence on the slope stability within the surrounding areas and triggered numerous secondary geohazards including co-seismic landslides and rockfalls, which incurred drastic surface changes...

Zhao et al. (2019) examine gigantic landslides in the Diexi area along the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau and propose their successive failure based on a knickpoint migration conceptual model. They postulate that a major river knickpoint (KpMJ) identified by them in the middle reaches of the Minjiang River (Sichuan, China) was initiated at t...

Upsurge of glacier-related hazards in High Mountain Asia (HMA) has been evident in recent years due to global warming. While many glacial-related hazards are instantaneous, some large landslides were preceded by slow gravitational deformation, which can be predicted to evade catastrophes. Here, we present robust evidence of historical deformation i...

On 24 June 2017, a rockslide-debris avalanche occurred in Xinmo Village, Maoxian County, Sichuan Province, China. The displaced materials traveled approximately 2.6 km and caused 83 casualties. Combined with the field investigation, seismic signal, and numerical simulation, the dynamic process and deposit characteristics of the Xinmo landslide were...

Objectives: Integrated remote sensing application based on the space‑air‑ground investigation system has been promoted nationwide and has achieved certain results. However, as the work progresses, some urgent problems have been exposed, such as how to define hidden hazards and what types of them, what are the targeted identification technologies, a...

Loess slopes along the Yellow River in China are prone to failure in response to intensive irrigation. Existing studies found that the wetting front depth subjected to intensive farming water could barely reach 6 m in loess terrace. Long-term field monitoring revealed that irrigation water takes a short time to recharge the groundwater. Yet the dyn...